Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality.
ALDOUS HUXLEYChronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY